Fritz Leiber 43 min read

Sailing his sloop into a lonely New England cove, a young man comes ashore at an island house frozen in the past, and meets a beautiful girl who has been dead, it seems, for twenty years.

Fritz Leiber's 1952 story is a haunting, superbly crafted social-SF and time-travel tale. Eerie, poignant, brilliantly told. Read it for one of Leiber's finest, a quietly chilling mystery of a house and a girl seemingly sealed off in a vanished decade, unfolding a rational but deeply unsettling secret, in a masterful golden-age piece of mood, mystery, and melancholy.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

43 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

William Ashman